The Serious Business Report

SBR #4: World Hoppers: On Playing Multiple MMOs

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games are timesinks. Can one person find time for several MMOs?

I've recently been able to get my World of Warcraft playing time down to one night a week. Tuesday night is my WoW night, when I join my raiding guild for an evening of boss killing, lowbrow comedy over voice chat, and some light business in the auction house. It's a great feeling to be able to have a focused play experience waiting for me on these nights. But on the remaining six evenings of the week, I sometimes feel like I have time for more.

I've been thinking that I'd like to become a virtual world hopper: a player who finds time to play multiple MMOs. It was difficult coming up with a name for this sort of gamer, and I polled some of my coworkers for assistance. It went something like this:

Gerald: Hey guys, what would you call someone who plays multiple MMOs, like I'm thinking of doing?

Allen: Planeswalker? Game Hopper?

Gerald: World Hopper?

Bill: Unemployed?

Bill may have hit it on the head.

Let me head you off before the kneejerk responses of "get a life," "zomg the real world is calling you," and "pathetic loser needs to /wrists." Over the years, my work as a games critic has allowed me to indulge in this hobby to a far greater degree than would be healthy for your typical MMO enthusiast. It's a mixed blessing to be able to write off my time spent in virtual worlds as "work-related research." I'd like to play more console games, but MMOs are just my thing, my favorite kind of game.

Over the course of the last decade or so, I've played a great many MMOs, from EverQuest and Anarchy Online on to Warhammer Online and World of Warcraft. If you were to add up all the hours that I've invested in MMOs, I've probably invested a solid year or two of play time. I don't recommend this sort of behavior to anyone else, but I've found it useful, if only to see how far the model has come, and how little it's changed.

I'd like to say that my life is well-balanced, even though videogames and MMOs in particular are a big part of my day to day. My wife plays World of Warcraft, and when we settle in together in our home office for a late-night game session, we're spending time together. But when she wants to spend an evening watching reality television or "Dog Whisperer," I find myself craving the carefully administered IV drip of personal accomplishment that MMOs can offer.